Fall Creek

(A poem about my visit with my Grandfather, Arvis Tuggle, to the location of his childhood home in Wayne County, Ky., which was covered with the waters of Lake Cumberland in 1950).

Your hand in mine, we shuffled down shaley banks,
The water lapped quietly, the sun shone down;
Bathed in memories of your past here,
Clearly I saw your youth cleft down amongst the ridgelines:
The river coursing briskly, rolling from faraway hollows,
Rolling past leafy hemp fields in Cumberland lowland,
Garden herbs and vegetables, beside a three room home.
Morning dew, on crushed grass, beneath a child’s print.
The midsummer dry dust and evening light,
Dancing together beneath the tires of an old Schwinn cycle.
Low lowing of cattle, grazing in the green bottom,
Children shouting, running into the green shallows or hollows,
Or the plop of a bobber in the ceaseless currents,
After the spring floods as the Mockingbird cried.
Meeting the Ferryman kinsman for a river ride,
To the other side, over to Oak Grove south of Nancy.
And the little church there, shaded by poplar, oak, and maple,
Gospel strains flowed from the house of God at eventide,
Echoed in the last pinks and purples of a Sunday sun,
And the fiery Word of Ancient Days,
Thundering through the night, darkness embraced by Light.
In the deepening shadows of late youth, mail on the wooden table,
Warnings of the Flood and pilgrimage forced.
The dissembling of life young, portrayed in:
A house taken down, board and nail,
A barn and henhouse removed,
Wood carried away on a flatbed Chevy,
The land laid bare and burned clear,
Memorials erased, only memories,
And the empty brown, where once life grew,
Soon to be under the Deep, hidden from view.
Your hand in mine, we stared out over the sloshing water,
It lapped quietly, the sun shone down;
Bathed in the sunlight of the day,
Clearly I saw your youth cleft, in your face’s lines.